The Course of Empire
by Antebellum Innocence
Summary: She thought it was going to be all right at first. My slightly different take on the "girl on the island" concept.


_author's note._ So. "Girl on the island" stories. I'll be honest, they're not my favorite things. HOWEVER this idea refused to leave me alone, so I went with it. Rest assured that it won't be typical of the genre. More specifically, the presence of an extra character changes things eventually, and pretty drastically at that. In addition to that, I'm avoiding official romance in this story. I could go on and on about why I think only a certain kind of girl could ever survive on the island, but I'll spare you poor readers. xD

Also, there is a crapload of symbolism in this thing. If you catch any of it, I love you.

_disclaimer._ Don't own Lord of the Flies, religious and political symbolism, or an island. I do own Margaret, though I don't know if that's anything to brag about.

* * *

**i. the fall**

If there was one thing that Margaret Matlock could claim to hate with total confidence, that one thing was flying. She hated the takeoff, the landings, and the pressure that built in her ears, but she particularly hated the brief feeling of weightlessness in her stomach that came on whenever the plane lowered for an instant. As soon as they had all filed into the rows of seats and settled down, she'd reached across Merridew's lap and tugged the shade down over the window. Being made fun of a bit was a small price to pay if it meant she wouldn't have to spend the six hour flight watching the ground pass by thousands of feet beneath them.

She thought it was going to be all right at first. They would land at their destination (what was it called? Margaret always forgot the name, but she remembered it made her think of turtles with great brown shells, gliding blissfully through warm green water) and stay there until the war was over. Father Paul had told her they would all be back home in Canterbury, back to the brick buildings of St. Augustine's and the vaulted arches of the school chapel, before she knew it. She only had to keep the smaller boys in the choir from wandering off and squeeze her eyes shut whenever the plane rocked like that. It always stopped soon enough and gave her stomach a chance to right itself.

Then the plane lurched again, and this time, it didn't stop.

She closed her eyes and tried to will the plummeting feeling away. It only worsened, falling lower and deeper into the pit of her stomach. She clutched at the armrests, prayed that she had fallen asleep, that she would wake up in just a moment to find the plane coasting smoothly along and Merridew watching her horror-stricken face in amusement. _All right, Matlock?_ he'd ask with a teasing grin, and she'd say, _oh, shut up_ while pretending to be angry. Everything would be fine.

The airplane jolted violently. Dragged from the temporary sanctuary in her head by the confused shouts around her, Margaret opened her eyes. Once she had seen the identical look of alarm on everyone's faces, her already-fading hope that this was a dream shattered.

One of the littlest boys burst into tears, which soon led to a chorus of wails. The older boys, clearly panicking themselves, made no attempt to comfort them. In the chaos, children were unbuckling their seatbelts and milling about the plane. Undoing her own safety belt, Margaret knelt on the seat to better see what was happening.

None of the other passengers seemed to be any more coherent than she was at the moment; most of them were wearing expressions of stupefied horror. "We're going to crash!" a bespectacled boy several rows in front of her was shrieking. "We got more than a seventy percent chance of dying!" Not surprisingly, this wasn't helping matters at all. Some of the smaller boys only began to cry louder upon hearing such grim statistics.

Across the aisle, she saw Simon, the boy who stood in the first row of the choir and sometimes fainted halfway through a performance, staring out the window. His face was strikingly serene, wide hazel eyes fixed on the sky as if there were nothing wrong. Margaret thought he looked far too calm for someone in this situation, but before she could call out to him, one of the youngest members of the choir — Henry, she thought, although everything was such a blur that she couldn't be sure — dashed forward and grabbed hold of her arm. She could barely understand a word he was saying through his tears and the murky dread in her brain.

While the boy who might have been Henry clung to her waist, Margaret turned in desperation toward Merridew, who was sitting motionless in his seat and staring stonily ahead. "Jack!" she cried, decorum forgotten, and got only silence in reply. Feeling the anger start to burn in her throat when she called his name again and he didn't even acknowledge her, she snapped, "Jack Merridew, you _look_ at me! This plane is falling out of the sky and we are all _terrified_ and _you_ are off in some other world—!"

"Well, what do you want me to _do_, Margaret?" he cut in. He turned to face her, and his eyes were wild as he said, "It isn't as if I can fix this! Do you want me to hold the plane up in the air, Margaret? Would you like me to turn back time so we can board a different plane?"

"Of course I don't!" she said, not even sure what she was talking about anymore. There was a prickly heat rising in her cheeks. "All I'm asking is that you at least _try_ to help!" Henry's sobs were growing louder by the second, and she tore her gaze away from Jack's to blink away the tears now gathering in the corners of her eyes. _Stop it_, she told herself, pressing her lips together to suppress a small sob of her own.

Jack's voice sounded miles away. "Look, don't cry," he said. She could tell that the desperation in his tone was more from fear for their lives than remorse.

"I'm not crying," she insisted, refusing to look at him.

"There's nothing I can do!" he repeated. "Don't you blame _me_ because the pilot's incompetent—" At that moment, the plane trembled and rolled. The world seemed to turn on its side; everyone grabbed hold of whatever or whoever was nearest, and even when the aircraft returned to its original position, the screams wouldn't stop. Margaret fought back her nausea and tried in vain to comfort Henry, who was shaking against her side.

"All right, everybody quiet down!" yelled someone at the other end of the compartment. Smoothing Henry's hair with one hand, Margaret craned her neck and peered over the seat in front of her to find out whose voice that was. The speaker appeared to be a fair-haired boy who was now standing in the middle of the aisle, calling for everyone's attention. It took a minute for him to be heard over the commotion, but finally the screaming died away.

The fair-haired boy wasted no time. "We're going to crash," he announced in an admirably level tone. This matter-of-fact statement set several of the children murmuring fearfully, but the boy raised both hands to silence them. "We have to stay calm," he said. "If everyone panics, it's just going to make things worse!"

Even in this dazed state, the others realized that his advice was sound. Margaret took a deep breath and tried to exhale the worry coiled in her chest. "Remember what they told us to do before the plane took off," the fair-haired boy was saying, "in case of an emergency? That's what we should do now, so everyone get into the crash position…"

The mention of the emergency plan somehow broke panic's hold over her. "Right, come on," she said to Henry, "get back to your seat and do what he's told you…" Though traces of fear still lingered in his face, Henry seemed reassured by the fair-haired boy's show of leadership, and he hurried back up the aisle toward his seat.

Moments later, children all over the plane were crouched forward in the crash position with their hands atop their heads. Margaret's eyes swept the plane, making sure that all the boys were safely in position — her gaze lingered for a moment on Simon, whose small body was curled in on itself, his feet planted firmly on the floor. "If we survive the crash, we got to get out of the plane _quickly_!" the boy with glasses was saying.

She turned to Jack, who was still sitting upright with a dazed look in his eyes. He seemed unsure how to react to someone else taking control for once, but when the plane lurched once more, he scrambled to imitate the others.

Currents of air buffeted the plane from all sides. Margaret leaned forward with her hands behind her head, brought in her elbows, and squeezed her eyes shut tight.

They crashed.

* * *

The sun overhead cast sparkling flecks and ribbons of light into the waves. Margaret idly skimmed the surface of the water with one hand as the choir's life raft, pushed along by Roger, Bill, and Maurice, approached the island in the distance. All of the raft's passengers were huddled together, seeking comfort and shelter from the sea spray. When the water under Margaret's fingertips turned to grains of sand and they washed ashore, a palpable feeling of relief settled over the group.

One by one, they got unsteadily to their feet and stumbled out onto the beach. Margaret stared hopelessly at the white head of the mountain peeking up above the tops of the trees. The choir was still drifting close together, wide-eyed and lost, and not knowing how to help them only made her heart heavier.

Jack appeared at her side. His robes were disheveled, but the light of authority was again shining in his eyes. "What do we do now?" she asked quietly. From somewhere on the other side of the island, there came a bellowing call, as if someone were blowing a trumpet.

"Do you hear that?" Jack replied, his pale eyes narrowing in concentration. When the trumpet sounded again, he demanded the choir's attention. "Follow me," he ordered, and took off into the forest in search of whoever else was on the island with them.

It was some time before the choir emerged on the beach in two black-clad rows only to find not a rescue party but a crowd of other children, headed by the fair-haired boy from the plane. He held a large cream-colored conch shell in his hands and was listening impatiently to the overweight boy with glasses who had been telling them their chances for survival during the panic. "Where's the man with the trumpet?" Jack demanded, approaching the boys on the makeshift platform. He ignored the choir's pleas to remove their heavy robes.

"There is no man with a trumpet," the fair-haired boy answered, "just us."

Jack gave no sign of wanting to reply, so after a moment of uncomfortable silence, Margaret stepped out of the line of choirboys. "We're alone, then?" she said, still hoping in the back of her mind that someone would say otherwise.

The fair-haired boy opened his mouth to respond, but the stilted conversation came to an abrupt halt when Simon swayed precariously and then tipped sideways in a dead faint. The trappings of society reflexively extended her arms, and the small boy collapsed into them, sending both Margaret and himself down onto the sand as whispers filled the meeting place. "Is he all right?" asked the boy with the conch; his voice sounded far away.

"Oh, Simon's always throwing a faint," came Jack's disdainful voice.

The meeting continued above her, but Margaret couldn't seem to pay much attention to what was being said. She smoothed Simon's hair absentmindedly as snippets of discussion floated over her head without context. "Her name's Margaret — she's our headmaster's daughter," Jack was saying. "He wanted her evacuated with the choir…" She touched the side of her head and found that her dark hair was matted with blood from an injury she hadn't noticed.

In the meeting, the boys were making rules (_we'll need a fire; you have to be holding the conch to talk_). She approved of this, in a vague, muddled way, watching Simon's features as they began to twitch back into consciousness. Before long, he stirred again, eyes blinking open and looking around in mild confusion. Margaret, too, tried to tune back into the conversation, but she couldn't keep her attention on it for more than a minute or so at a time.

Jack seemed to be asking who wanted to vote for him as leader, and around her, the choir was dutifully raising their hands, though most of them didn't look particularly interested in the election. "And who wants me?" the boy with the conch asked — she thought she'd heard someone call him Ralph. Immediately, all the gathered boys who weren't members of the choir raised their hands. Margaret fought to collect her muddled thoughts; a part of her knew that she should vote for Jack, not some stranger she had met only hours ago and barely spoken a word to. But the way the other boy, Ralph, had taken charge while the plane was crashing lingered in her brain.

She raised her hand as well. Jack's eyes narrowed at her as an overweight, bespectacled boy standing next to Ralph began counting the number of hands in the air. The choir was outnumbered by the larger crowd of boys; Ralph was clearly the victor.

Ralph glanced at Jack, and something seemed to click intuitively in his head. "You can be in charge of the choir," he added, trying to appease the red-haired boy, out of friendliness or political sense. She wasn't sure which. "They can be whatever you'd like them to be." (To some degree, she realized that if Jack had won, he wouldn't have delegated responsibility to the loser.)

"Hunters," Jack declared.

Something in his voice made Margaret suppress a shiver.

They decided to explore the island, scout around to see if there was any food, or — and she still clung to that hope — someone who could help them. "I'll go, and Jack," Ralph said. "And… Simon, if you're well now?" Simon smiled and agreed, climbing to his feet and giving Margaret an apologetic look. He was obviously sorry for falling on top of her. She smiled wanly back at him as she felt the wound on her head again. To her relief, it seemed like a more or less shallow cut in spite of all the blood.

Now that Simon had moved out of the way, Ralph seemed to remember Margaret, staring at her thoughtfully for a moment as if he was trying to figure out what she was good for. She blinked defiantly up at him until he averted his eyes and looked over to the pudgy boy with glasses, who he'd left standing on the platform. "And you. Margaret, isn't it?" Ralph asked her. "You're not hurt?"

"No, I'm all right," she said. The injury to her head didn't appear too severe, though her mind was still a little fuzzy. But even if it had been serious, there was an instinctual part of her brain that warned her not to display any weakness to the boys, for reasons she couldn't fully explain yet.

Ralph nodded and turned to the boy with the glasses, presenting him with the conch. "Piggy, I want you to get all of the names, make a list," he told the boy, who was cradling the conch like it was a child of his, just returned home after a long absence. The boy — Piggy, they seemed to call him, though that couldn't be his real name — opened his mouth to protest, complaining that there were too many people for him to keep track of. "Margaret can help you, right, Margaret?" Ralph suggested.

"Of course," she replied. She already knew all the choir members, and it wouldn't be too hard to organize all the others. Her eyes scanned the crowd and lit on Roger, who led the second line when the choir marched. The expression on his face was dark and hard, and she barely managed not to shudder. She followed his gaze across the gathering to the overweight boy, wondering what he could have done to earn a look of such hatred. And then she realized that Roger was staring particularly at the cream-colored conch shell in Piggy's hands.

As Jack, Simon, and Ralph set off down the shoreline of the beach, their forms growing smaller and fading away into the distance, Margaret looked out over the endless blue-green water and thought back to the chapel at St. Augustine's. _Our Father, who art in heaven_, she thought, _hallowed be thy Name._ _Pater noster, qui es in caelis, __sanctificetur Nomen Tuum._

A wind rustled through the trees that grew on the mountain.

_Deliver us from evil._


End file.
